Style note

Three exemplars

The Panama Canal is a lake. Skip the shipping-lane opener. Name the lake and the rain. When the water is low, write the lock.

The drone is a tax. A cheap airframe spends the magazine. Name the factory and the round, not the footage.

Iceland’s surplus watt cannot reach Europe without a cable. Surplus power on an island is not a European watt. The missing object is a cable, not a slogan about clean energy.

Do

• Headline with a concrete noun phrase.
• Write a dek that is not the first sentence of the body.
• Keep the piece under 800 words unless the extra length earns its keep.
• Link the source. Do not announce that you used other people’s reporting.

Pre-publish checklist

1. Headline is a concrete noun phrase.
2. Dek is hand-written, not the first body sentence.
3. The piece is ≤750 words unless the extra length earns it.
4. X is not Y appears at most once.
5. No desk jargon on a Reader page.
6. One unique image, or a text card.
7. Byline or initials.
8. One disclaimer, in the footer.
9. Last line is not the headline.
10. Sources are links, not a provenance speech.

Don’t

• Open with “The lazy story is…”.
• Use “X is not Y” more than once, and never in both the kicker and the last line.
• Print hypothesis IDs, kill lines, GET /api, hashes, or “not a grade” on a Reader page.
• End by repeating the headline.
• Say “the desk” in public copy.

Hosting

One public host. No desk subdomain. The sitemap and the essay feed cover the same site.